There’s a lot of details I’ll get wrong in education.  (Same was true when I was employed in mainstream education too.)

Ideas shift.  Trends in education rise and fill.  Diagramming sentences matters in one decade, not so much in the next.  I started farming out math to tutors and computer “textbooks” at about the third grade.  Science isn’t my jam.  At home we don’t raise our hands and sometimes we do history class in our pajamas.  We travel as much as we’re able for the best sort of learning and no one calls roll each morning.

The one long standing, enduring, hasn’t changed detail that I do manage to get right, however, is books.  Reading.  Every day.  Out loud.  To themselves.  At the table.  In the living room.  On audio in the car.  We talk about books at lunch and we buy books for our friends and the library is vital to the routine of our lives.  We read for fun and we read to laugh and we read to learn about how to make the best paper airplane and we read about poetry and about science and about enzymes and about manners and about little women and wild horses and wizards and wardrobes and towns on the prairie.

Tonight we finished Auggie & Me, a companion book to Wonder – the book we fell in love with this school year.  Most nights I read a chapter or two of a novel to the kids in the living room before bed.  At Christmas I try to find a holiday-themed book for our school read aloud.  Last year it was the classic Best Christmas Pageant Ever.  This year it’s The House Without a Christmas Tree.

I’ve been desperately trying to be more proactive in my own nighttime rituals and routines and I’ve been shutting the phone and computer down at least half an hour before bed (an hour if I’m really on top of my game) and reading in bed before I drift to sleep.  This week I wrapped up Son by Lois Lowry.  It’s a companion or sequel of sorts to her famous novel The Giver.  Son was so compelling and filled in lots of gaps – what a satisfying read, even if it was a little depressing to me as well.  I also finished the third Harry Potter book in a futile attempt to keep up with my children’s obsession with Hogwarts.  I definitely liked this third one better but when I see the thickness of the next four novels my brain feels like slush.  I started a non-fiction book I picked up spontaneously at the library called Troublemakers.  It is about the problem with labeling kids in school settings and the dangers of forcing kids to uniformity.  The idea sounded of interest but it felt an awful lot like whining to me and I never bothered to finish it.  I used to feel bad if I didn’t complete a book I started.  I no longer carry that guilt.

This summer I bought the older students a literary journal that I found at Barnes & Noble.  And for some reason I impulsively purchased one for myself as well.  (You can also find them at Amazon. (affiliate link.))

It’s been such a great self-discipline to do this – to write in this Literary Journal.

It forces me to succinctly retell a plot and to summarize characters, to give a clear and distinct short review.  To be brief but to be thorough.  What a hard task.

It also allows me to the opportunity to practice what I preach.  To see how difficult it is to sum up certain novels and certain ideas.

And it’s a satisfying record that reminds me that I am accomplishing some adult education and some reading entertainment in my own life as well.

I need a couple of winter recommendations actually.  (In between my Harry Potter readings, of course.)  I’d love a couple of non-fiction and fiction options.

Tell me what you’re reading now and what I should read next.

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